The most recent Pac Man slot was released by a company called Triple Profits in 2020 and goes with another Pac Man-themed online slots game
It's hard to think of a video game more classic than Pac Man. If you're under the age of 25, you may never have played it at all, but you'll at least know what it is. To our younger readers, Pac Man is a game that their parents played. It might even be a game that their grandparents played. It's a distant video gaming memory, out there in the long grass with Space Invaders and Asteroids. The sophistication of video games has come a long way since those pioneering days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but there will always be an audience for the classics. That's why Pac Man games are still made today. These days the big trend in video games is the "battle royale" experience. Mass-multiplayer "kill everything in sight" games have been popular ever since the first multiplayer version of Call of Duty, but within the past five years, the genre has reached new heights thanks to the near-universal appeal of Fortnite. The game, played by millions of people all over the world every day, is a pop culture phenomenon. There were some reports last year that its popularity was beginning to wane after years of riding the crest of the wave, but the most recent figures available say that isn't true. Fortnite is more popular than ever. That means battle royale games are more popular than ever, too.
The idea of grafting a battle royale mode onto a classic video gaming property from more than thirty years ago might sound odd, but it's been done successfully before. Last year, a quirky battle royale version of the 1980s classic Super Mario Bros proved to be popular on the internet. That must have gone somebody thinking about the potential of doing the same thing with Pac Man because that's exactly what's happened. Super Mario Bros 35, the aforementioned Super Mario Bros battle royale game, is no longer available. In its place is Pac Man 99, which is available for the Nintendo Switch immediately. If the Mario battle royale game and the recent Tetris battle royale game are anything to go by, it'll be available as a Nintendo Switch Online subscription service exclusive for somewhere between three and six months before being withdrawn. For those reasons, if you're interested in playing an MMO version of Pac Man, we suggest that you act quickly to make sure you get your copy in case it abruptly disappears forever.
History tells us that Pac Man does quite well when the character steps out of his comfort zone. The song "Pac Man Fever" was a hit in the USA during the early 1980s, and a successful Pac Man cartoon ran between 1982 and 1983. More recently, there's been the "Pac Man and the Ghostly Adventures" animated series by Disney in 2013 and a game inspired by the character aimed at gamblers at online slots websites. The most recent Pac Man slot was released by a company called Triple Profits in 2020 and goes with another Pac Man-themed online slots game called "Pac Man: Wild Edition" that was made by Ainsworth Games a few years earlier. Rose Slots and other websites like it should have one or both of those online slots if they interest you. The point we're making here is that Pac Man doesn't have to stay true to the format of the original game in order to be a success. There's every reason to think that a battle royale version of Pac Man is something that players might be interested in - but the big question is, "how does it work?"
If you were one of the many people who played the MMO Mario game we referenced above, you'll might already know how to answer that question. When you load Pac Man 99, your individual game is displayed in the centre of the screen. Surrounding your game is a collection of mini-screens, showing you how all your opponents are getting on. Every time you eat a ghost in your game, it's transported into one of the games being played by your opponents. By using various power-ups and other special tools, you can make their game faster, send "jammer" characters to their game, and otherwise inconvenience them. The aim of the game is to be the last player still alive. You don't directly interact with your opponents, but you can certainly play a decisive role in terms of how long they're likely to be able to keep their Pac Man character alive for.
While Namco and Nintendo have kept the look and feel of the game as close to the original as possible, they've included a few extras and perks for hardcore gaming veterans. You can adjust the soundtrack if you wish, and you can also spice up the visual theme a little by selecting options based on other Namco classics of the past. Playing Pac Man with a Galaga theme is honestly not something we'd ever thought about before, but now we've done it, we can confirm it looks very cool. The Dig Dug theme is a little surreal, but we're glad it's there. The game is full of Easter eggs, and so we won't spoil any of them here, but suffice to say you should find lots of little surprises waiting for you if you're prepared to do the hard work of going looking for them.
If you have a Nintendo Switch but don't yet have a subscription and you want to play this game, you'll hopefully be pleased to know it doesn't cost much to get involved. For players in the UK, a Nintendo Switch Online subscription is £3.49 per month. If you're prepared to pay for a full twelve months upfront, you get a slight discount, taking the price to £17.99. Your subscription includes access to all the games in the extensive library and even "virtual" versions of the old NES and SNES consoles for you to enjoy. There are microtransactions within the Pac Man game to enable the purchase of optional extras, but they're not compulsory, and gameplay isn't affected by not buying them. The game is available right now, so if you're a young gamer with an old soul or an old gamer with an eye on nostalgia, you know what to do!
